Asia's Richest Billionaires

This article is published in collaboration with Statista

by Anna Fleck

According to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List, as of June 19, Mukesh Ambani is the richest man in Asia, with a net worth of $91.4 billion. Ambani is the chairman of Reliance Industries Limited, a conglomerate that focuses not only on petrochemicals, but also textiles and telecommunications. He ranks 11th on Forbes’ worldwide list, which is headed by Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter) with $236.9 billion, Bernard Arnault & family (LVMH) with $231.9 billion and Larry Ellison (Oracle) with $156.2 billion.

In second place - and some 27 billion dollars behind - comes 68-year-old Zhong Shanshan, with a net worth of $64.2 billion. Shanshan is the founder of beverages company Nongfu Spring as well as the founder of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, a private Chinese company that is a major supplier of Covid-19 testing kits. He is succeeded by Gautam Adani (60), who is the chairperson of the Adani Group, a conglomerate that deals with businesses exporting and importing raw materials and finished goods, including coal trading, mining, oil and gas exploration, as well as ports, energy and agricultural commodities.

As the following chart shows, the two Asian BRICS countries stand out here, with China accounting for three out of eight people in this ranking (five out of eight if including Hong Kong), while Indian figures take two out of the top three positions. Also of note is the range of industries included on the list, many of which are relatively new sectors that are shaping the world today, from a pharmaceuticals company that creates vaccines, to social media platforms ByteDance (owner of TikTok) and Tencent (owner of WeChat), through to lithium-ion battery production. Gaming too ranks high, coming in ninth place, with NetEase, one of the world’s largest online and mobile games businesses, owned by China’s William Lei Ding (51), who has an estimated net worth of $31.2 billion.

Rounding off the top ten comes Colin Zheng Huang (43) of e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, which is the largest agricultural platform in China, with an estimated net worth of $28.1 billion. The top ten richest people in Asia - all of whom are men - have a total net worth of $459.9 billion.

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